In the thermocycler, each cycle of three steps lasts a total of 5 minutes because it takes approximately 30 seconds for the thermocycler to change temperatures between steps. Therefore, billions of copies of DNA will be produced after approximately how many minutes?

Question

Question 7 options:

5

15

150

15,000

Answer 1

In a typical PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) cycle, there are usually three steps:

1. Denaturation (separating the DNA strands)
2. Annealing (binding the primers to the DNA)
3. Extension (synthesizing new DNA strands)

According to your information, each cycle lasts a total of 5 minutes.

If we assume you want to know how long it will take to produce a significant amount of DNA, let's consider a common number of cycles (for example, 30 cycles).

Each cycle takes 5 minutes, so:

\[ 30 \text{ cycles} \times 5 \text{ minutes/cycle} = 150 \text{ minutes} \]

Thus, after 30 cycles, billions of copies of DNA will be produced after approximately 150 minutes.

The answer is 150.